Our Reality: Recent conversation with Gemini
What were Noam Chomsky's main points regarding language? Noam Chomsky revolutionized linguistics in the 1950s and 60s by shifting the focus from describing what people say to understanding how our brains are wired to produce language. He essentially moved linguistics from a branch of anthropology to a branch of cognitive psychology. Here are his core pillars: 1. Universal Grammar (UG) Chomsky proposed that human beings are born with an innate, biological "blueprint" for language. This isn't a specific language like English or Urdu, but rather a set of underlying rules and constraints common to all human languages. The Argument: Since all human languages share certain structural properties (like nouns, verbs, and recursion), there must be a genetic component that dictates these patterns. 2. The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) He argued against the "blank slate" theory—the idea that children learn language purely through imitation and reward (...